Gulf Between Classes, Races Keeps Kids From Help

"That's a very good question, and there probably is a Nobel Prize in there for someone," said Dr. Markus Kruesi, chief of child and adolescent psychiatry at the University of Illinois Medical School's Institute for Juvenile Research. He has studied serotonin levels in children and adolescents with behavior disorders and has found a relationship between low levels of serotonin and violence.

"I don't think the evidence is there to answer it," he said, "but that's one of the really frightening thoughts. Are we helping this to get stronger and stronger?"

Minority community leaders fear that if a chemical link to violent behavior were found, it might raise the possibility of controlling that behavior with medicine.

"It can become sort of the lazy person's approach to dealing with problems that have both biological and social aspects," said Roderick Watts, member of the board of directors of the Chicago chapter of the Association of Black Psychologists.

"People begin to think about these as problems that can be controlled medically and if you can develop a drug to control biological behavior, it can be stopped. . . . But we have to be especially wary of cheap solutions that don't require us to examine society," he said.

In his jobs as chief of psychiatry at the Texas Children's Hospital and a researcher at the Baylor College of Medicine, both in Houston, Dr. Bruce Perry often sees evidence of biologically hypercharged brains in his young at-risk patients. But he has no inclination to "fix" them with medication.

"The brain, in a chaotic, unpredictable world, should develop to be hyperreactive," Perry said, "and that person should be more aggressive because that is the adaptive response.

"When a kid from that background is not hypervigilant, I think there is something wrong with his brain. He's usually retarded, or some other phenomenon is going on in his brain."

In other words, what needs to be fixed is not the child, but the environment: the family, societal and financial circumstances in which the child lives. Of those, the greatest environmental factor in predicting the outcome of a child's life is whether the child lives in poverty.

Poverty shrinks a child's world and increases the chance he will be touched by violence. Such a child will often become fearful and anxious.

Children are the poorest age group in the United States, representing 40.1 percent of the people living in poverty, though they account for only 25 percent of the population, according to U.S. Bureau of the Census figures released in October. Of poor children, those 3 years old and under are the poorest of all.

"People are fond of saying there has always been poverty, and yes, that's true. Cities always have had poverty, but it was a temporary, though harsh, way of disciplining people to the labor market," said Stephanie Coontz, historian and author of "The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap."

Among minority cultures in this country, African-Americans are by far the most researched in terms of the effect of poverty on families, with relatively little work having been done on Asian, Hispanic, Native American families. Black communities have been of particular interest to scientists because they have been impacted not just by poverty but by a debilitating mix of poverty and racism.

As blacks arrived in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and other northern cities in the great migration that began during World War I, Europeans also continued to immigrate. Though both groups became new residents of the great American cities, their experiences were entirely different.

European immigrants, mostly young people, through networking or entrepreneurship eventually improved their economic situations.

Though many of those immigrants were able to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, residents of the black ghettos of the urban north found that much more difficult to do.

Over time, racism isolated those communities. Job seekers were cut off from the informal networks that helped people find employment. Lifelong welfare appeared where there once had been a tradition of temporary welfare leading to work. Poverty became multigenerational. What had been a pervasive sense of hope for a better future achieved through hard work evaporated.

A poll this year by the Children's Defense Fund and the Black Community for Safer Children found only 14 percent of black adults agreeing that these were good times for young people. Nearly half said their greatest fear for the youth of their communities was violence.